The inquiry of my text is simply the reiteration of the question that David asks in Psalms 8:4 as he beheld the creative work of God. In Isaiah 40: 12 the prophet records His wondrous work when he writes, “He hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance.” He created it all with a spoken word.
Following the creation of the heavens and earth and all that was therein God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…….and the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” God crowned man with glory and honor and gave him dominion over all that had been created.
The tragedy of the fall occurred because while man was given mastery over all creation he never learned to master himself. Through disobedience he forfeited his honor and dominion; sin and death passed upon the entire human race. However, God had already planned for such an occurrence and had instituted His plan of salvation that culminated in the death and resurrection of our Savior. This great act of sacrificial love should cause all mankind to ask the question, “what is man, that thou art mindful of him? Or the son of man, that thou visitest him?”
1. God’s consideration of man is certainly not because of the worth of the chemical substance and make-up of the human body. This could be purchased at a drugstore with just a few dollars.
2. Neither is it because God requires the energy of the machine (body) to run His vast universe. As a machine the body can generate about 1/10 of a horse power and maintain that level for 8 hours. Man himself is able to develop a machine that can do more work in an hour than he can in a month.
One behaviorist said that as an automobile is a machine that does one type of work, man is a machine that does another sort of work. He failed to understand that while man can generate a measure of energy, unlike a man-made machine, man is the director and driver of his machine because he is mind as well as matter. While an automobile is self-moving it is not self-steering.
Man was the crown of creation and unlike the rest of creation he was created to share God’s name and bear His image. He was given an eternal spirit and a will that gave him the power of self-determination. It was the misuse of this power that de-faced the God image in man. Through the sin of covetousness man wanted to be god and life was no longer centered around God. Man became self-centered. Like the rich farmer of Luke 12 he became small and impoverished thinking only of self, the ego ‘I’. The rich farmer said, “I have much goods laid up for many years…” He thought only of his own selfish welfare and in terms of ‘many years’ but God said, ‘this night thy soul shall be required of thee.”
What is man? He is an eternal spirit and as such he is larger than the world in which he dwells. The soul of man is so vast that if you drop the whole world with all of its power, pleasure, and possessions into it, it would rattle around with resounding emptiness. Proverbs 16: 32 says, “He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city.”
C. S. Lewis said that man is made for something more than this world can afford him. When he finds a restlessness within that this world cannot satisfy he will then realize that he was made for another world. God’s preventing grace awakens within man an innate hunger for something beyond himself and the world. This is evidence that traces of that created image remains in fallen man and it is to this that the Holy Spirit makes His appeal to draw man back to Himself. God is not only mindful of man but visits him and puts within him the urge to come back to Him. When the quest for God becomes intense and conditions are met, God enables man through the hand of faith to reach into the sacred death of our Savior and appropriate the provisions of salvation.
“What is man that thou art mindful of him? Or the son of man, that thou visits him?” Man is God’s master piece in creation and when, through disobedience, man became alienated from the Creator, Jesus came “to give His life a ransom for all.” When we think of the infinite price that God paid for man’s redemption we are made to realize the value and worth of one soul from God’s perspective. If God so loved us that He paid such a price for our salvation it would seem that we who are recipients of His grace and mercy should share that same love and compassion for our lost world.
When the Psalmist “considered the heavens, the works of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained,” he was made to realize that it all paled into mere insignificance when compared to MAN, God’s crown of creation and the supreme object of His love in redemption
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